If you enjoy looking at a map and wondering what life is like in the places you’ve never heard of, here are ten names to look up. Some are island nations, others are territories with their own identities, and one is a mountain region whose recent history has reshaped life there.
We start with the freshwater pools of Vanuatu, cross the English Channel and the Irish Sea, and finish in the South Caucasus. How many of these places could you find on a map without searching for them?
4Tokelau
Tokelau consists of three coral atolls in the South Pacific: Atafu, Nukunonu and Fakaofo. Each forms a ring around a lagoon. Together they make up a territory of New Zealand, with no single capital.
There’s no airport, so visitors reach Tokelau by sea from Samoa. That gives a better sense of its remoteness than a dot on a map: the three communities live around separate lagoons, with the open Pacific between them.
